OLDaily

By Stephen Downes
January 15, 2005

LionsTimelineFrom2004Note:
corrected link. Lion Kimbro, who was so badly treated by my
discussion system (sorry Lion), offers some long range
predictions. Note well the section on 'the hive mind' - I
think that something like this is very much likely to be
the case. "2009: This is where people really start to go,
'Whoah... We're the Hive Mind...'
It should be a dominant theme in movies by this point."
Wiki - so if you don't like his predictions, change them.
By Lion Kimbro, January, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

Gestion de l'information avec XMLCourse on XML, written completely in XHTML and rendered
using XSLT. Lots of good content with built-in quizzes
(also in XHTML). In French. The author notes, "a
work-in-progress: there might be bugs, spelling errors,
etc. The final version will be available around Marc 2005."
Also, because Internet Explorer does not render XHTML
properly, the course must be viewed in Firefox. By Daniel
Lemire, January, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

National Guidance Research ForumGraham Atwell sends this along: "The National Guidance
Research Forum website is an exciting new website which has
been designed for all those interested in guidance
research." Atwell adds, "What I like is that many authors
have been and are involved in developing the site. At a
technical level they are integrating blogging with
discussion in a plone based system and using rss and
trackback to link different entries." By Various Authors,
January, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

Network EducationWareScott
Leslie finds the Holy Grail: an open source audio-visual
web conferencing system. As Leslie notes, it was developed
by Mark Pullen and others at George Mason University and
has been around since 2002. Now that I have a newly
expanded web server, installation and testing will begin on
Monday. You can find NEW here.
By Scott Leslie, EdTechPost, January 14, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

Multisubculturalism: Computers and the End of
Progressive EducationMark Oehlert introduces
us to the work of David Shaffer, another researcher who
desperately needs a blog, an RSS feed,
that will get the word out. Oehlert recommends some of his
papers, but I started at the top of the list and landed on
this
one, an outstanding excursion into the realm of
microworld, epistemic frames, subcultures and the
educational philosophy og John Dewey. There are numerous
insights in thsi paper worth reporting: the importance of
diversity in learning and society, the role different
educational goals ought to play in a theory of education,
autoexpressive virtual worlds, and so much more. This gets
to the heart of much of my own thinking: "Practice,
identity, values, knowledge, and epistemology, I have
argued, are bound together into an epistemic frame...
epistemic frames are the ways of knowing with
associated with particular communities of practice." By
David Shaffer, January, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

The Blog BlogDave Pell launches
a blog called the Blog Blog, a blog about blogs (and I set
the record for the most uses of the word 'blog' in a
sentence). He writes, "The personal publishing revolution
will change forever the way we find, consume and share
news, commentary and other content." Quite right, and I am
thus vindicated.
By Dave Pell, January, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

The Yahoo Problem, And Its
SolutionDave Winer points to what he calls
the 'Yahoo Problem' - the need for a website to list a long
list of buttons to allow users of different RSS aggregator
software to subscribe to a feed, or worse, a content site
favouring one particular aggregator (as CNN does with
Yahoo, hence the 'problem'). Winer outlines a solution
involving a subscription server. Others
recommend a less centralized solution, such as Mike
Rowehl's Bitsplitter,
which is more along the lines of what I would propose. By
Dave Winer, Really Simple Syndication, January 12, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

User-Driven MetaData Definition: Tagging From
The RootsThere has been quite a bit of
discussion of the concept of folsonomies - classifications
created by user-designed categories - over the last week.
Robin Good's analysis
and synthesis
are good starting points. As David Weinberger points out,
the tag
revolution is continuing. "Thanks to del.icio.us and
then flickr in particular," he notes, "hundreds of
thousands of people have been introduced to bottom-up
tagging." Also related is a new service called Frassle, a service that
lets you "blog posts or web bookmarks (or even comments)
in any number of categories you create, so you can find
them again later." By Luigi Canali De Rossi, Robin Good,
January 5, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

Creative Problem-Solving ProcessDave Pollard writes, "It appears there may be as many as
12 steps in the process involved in solving problems or
making critical decisions, whether in a business context or
a broader social context." He presents this process in a
useful and clear diagram. What's interesting is that the
diagram makes it clear that problem solving is a
distributed process, with no individual performing
more than two or three of the twlve steps. My own work, for
example, revolves around the 'Understand', 'Organize', and
'Think Ahead' steps. Perhaps 'Reach Out' as well. By Dave
Pollard, How to Save the World, December 28, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

RSS_LOMWork on RSS_LOM
continues as Brian Sutherland offers another proposed
revision. RSS_LOM has tested successfully in RSS
aggregators, which means that it can be used to transport
learning object metadata. Some open questions remain about
the encoding of the metadata within the RSS file. The
article also list five potential functions of RSS_LOM. By
Brian Sutherland, Brian Sutherland's Journal, December 17,
2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

Altnet Trying to Mug CompaniesFor from the patent abuse department: a company is using
a patent it obtained on a decades-old programming technique
- associative arrays, or hashes - to attack peer-to-peer
(P2P) companies. By Jay Flemma, p2pnet, january 13, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]